Driving innovation in smaller municipalities: BUILD staff exchange in Tartu
Tartu is an Estonian city with approximately 100,000 inhabitants. Its Municipality doesn’t have a separate procurement department. Despite that, Tartu showcases that size does not limit the capacity for innovation. As the smallest municipality participating in the BUILD project, the recent staff exchange demonstrated its ability to lead in public procurement of innovation.
Sneak-peak at the agenda
The exchange was held at the Department of Communal Services. It handles procurements related to landscaping and cleaning services, environmental services, and road services.
The day-and-a-half-long staff exchange was designed to ensure theoretical learning in the mornings, with active visits and discussions around the city in the afternoons. The participants rented electric bicycles to enjoy an excursion showcasing Tartu’s innovative procurement achievements in 4D.
The topics discussed were:
- Overview of the procurement procedure and strategy in Tartu
- Overview and comparison of different procurement services between Turku, Tartu, and Rotterdam municipalities
- Pre-procurement technical dialogue, presented by CIVITTA
Procurement management in Tartu
In Tartu, each service department manages its own procurement processes independently. With a specialised team within those departments that handles procurement contracts. Therefore, Tartu does not have a separate, centralised procurement department.
Noteworthy areas to be imported into home practices
CONTRACT MANAGEMENT
A dedicated contract management team allows procurers to focus on new acquisitions without being burdened by contract oversight, increasing the quality of the new acquisitions.
DECENTRALIZED PROCUREMENT
At the same time, the decentralised approach is functional in this city size, with a two-fold positive effect:
· fewer resources are equally spread in the areas of service,
· greater expertise in specific areas.
As an example, in Turku, which has double Tartu’s population, procurement is centralised, limiting the ability of procurers to specialize in specific domains.
INNOVATIVE PROCUREMENT GUIDE
Estonia has a general guide and tool for innovative procurement. It is a great educational instrument for all procurers in Estonia, allowing them to roadmap the essential topics and procedures to be applied within the same country.
The limiting factor, however, is that this useful tool is hardly accessible to non-Estonian speakers. Nevertheless, the BUILD scope includes the activity of spotting powerful innovation procurement tools and increasing their accessibility within Europe.
Confronting challenges
During the discussions, the participating procurers talked about a few key issues that are common in all cities.
- Time and money
There is a common challenge of limited time and money for developing new, innovative procurement. The complexity of procurement laws plays a crucial role in time and resource management, hindering the encouragement of innovative procurement.
- Bid complexity
In all three cities – Tartu, Turku, and Rotterdam – there are difficulties in recognizing procurement with innovation potential. It’s common for them to receive too few bids if the procurement requirements are too complex.
Key takeaways
Turku’s participation in the BUILD project illustrates that smaller municipalities can also be leaders in innovation. Cities can grow together through collaboration, as proposed by Turku. By collaborating with the department responsible for construction and infrastructure (which falls outside the scope of Turku’s procurement services), they can establish common goals. By adopting and sharing best practices, Tartu and other participants contribute to the overall goal of enhancing public procurement across European cities.
